ON THE TABLE next to my bed, along with texts like the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad-Gita, and The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, there is a pale purple paperback I have consulted so frequently over the past several years that it is now almost falling apart. This is volume four of The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra.
Because I have read the passage so many times, the book often falls opens to the lines I highlighted in red ink on the day I bought it in 2003. They were the first words of teaching I ever saw from Daisaku Ikeda:
When we realize that our lives are one with the great and eternal life of the universe, we are the Buddha. The purpose of Buddhism is to enable all people to come to this realization.
I understood those words the first time I read them and even had a sense that they represented a shift in the way people might begin to think about religion, but it was only during a conversation with Soka Gakkai General Director Masaaki Masaki that I began to grasp the model they described.
Masaki recalled that after the break with the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood in 1991, he was inspired to reflect more deeply on the history of Buddhism and its various reform movements. It was a mistake to suppose that there was only one Lotus Sutra, he told me. President Toda had taught that there were at least three versions of the sutra already: the Lotus Sutra of Shakyamuni, the Lotus Sutra of T’ien-t‘ai, and the Lotus Sutra of Nichiren.
“The essence of the various Lotus Sutras is, of course, the same,” he explained. “But the way in which the sutra needs to be presented depends on the conditions of the age and the capacity of the people who read it. Shakyamuni taught the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Later, the Chinese sage T’ien-t’ai explained the ever-present nature of all reality in terms of ‘three thousand realms in a single moment of life.’ And still later, Nichiren taught Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. My own feeling is that there is a contemporary expression of the Lotus Sutra based on these and that this is what the three presidents of the Soka Gakkai have appeared in the world to teach. They have an obligation to teach the same essence as the other three sutras, of course, but in accordance with modes of expression that are appropriate to this age.”
Masaki asked if I agreed that it was legitimate to adapt the teachings in this way, and I replied by quoting the opening line of one of Nichiren’s most famous treatises: “When it comes to studying the teachings of Buddhism, one must first learn to understand the time.” Masaki explained that President Toda had taken the essence of these earlier teachings and revealed them in the doctrine that “the Buddha is life itself.” This was the core message of the Soka Gakkai and the essence of its approach to the Lotus Sutra. “All these point to the same thing—the same reality that is common to all,” he said. “Through his emphasis on the path of mentor and disciple, President Ikeda is teaching us how to put that new Lotus Sutra into practice.”
I told him that, based on my study of the Soka Gakkai and its teachings, I believed that it was not merely Shakyamuni Buddha who was “always in the world,” as the sixteenth chapter of the Lotus Sutra taught, but the Lotus Sutra itself. It was the nature of that sutra to remain always alive in the world; therefore, it found a way to get taught in each new epoch. I suggested it was possible to establish a kind of test to prove the appearance of a new sutra, not so much in terms of what it said as what it did.
When a new Lotus Sutra was born, that recalibrated message was so perfectly suited to the time and to the needs of the people that it could travel “up to the fiftieth person,” as the sutra had predicted, and still retain its message. In other words, the revolutionary flame of that message would tend to pass very quickly from person to person without losing any of its force and effect, “waking the Buddha” inherent in each individual as it traveled from hand to hand and heart to heart. As centuries passed, however, inevitably such a message would come to be understood by fewer and fewer people, until at last it could travel to only one other person. At that point a new version would be born in order to preserve its message. The way we know that a new Lotus Sutra has been born is that, suddenly, it can travel fifty people deep again. And the way I knew that a new expression of the Lotus Sutra has been born during the latter part of the twentieth century was that its message had spread in this way, reaching deep into the societies where it had traveled. This I had seen with my own eyes. The spirit of Human Revolution as taught by Daisaku Ikeda—empowering individuals and the championing of common human values—could be communicated to anyone, anywhere across the globe. How? Simply by telling them that what mattered was the dignity and value of their own lives—that if they could affirm that value and that dignity, the message would spread … and the world would change around them.
I had many opportunities to speak with the Soka Gakkai leadership about this “new sutra” on my visits to Japan, including the late Soka Gakkai Study Department Chief Katsuji Saito. The most significant part of our conversation involved Ikeda’s teachings on religious humanism. As Saito explained: “Buddhism is a humanistic religion, and the Soka Gakkai is the form of Buddhism that most clearly expresses Buddhism’s humanistic aspect. The basic stance of Buddhism, from a humanistic point of view, is that an ordinary human being can become a Buddha. Ikeda has consistently stressed that Buddhism exists for the sake of ordinary human beings and that the mission of the Soka Gakkai is to clarify that fact and bring it to the fore.”
Expressed so simply, this hardly seems like a revolutionary idea. In fact, as used in general conversation, the term humanism has become so vague and bland that it is hard to say exactly what it refers to. For this reason, in the West, humanism has become an exceptionally weak philosophical position, roughly analogous to the term secular, with which it is often paired. Today it has come to refer to a philosophical position that finds value in human life, human knowledge, and human society, irrespective of any religious system of value or belief. To say that one is a “secular humanist” in America is invariably to designate oneself an atheist, though perhaps an optimistic one.
There is no well-established tradition of religious humanism in the West. God may have created human beings in His image, according to the Bible, but we Westerners tend not to believe that we can trust in that belief to the extent of building a religion on being human. Perhaps this is due to the Christian idea of humanity as “fallen,” or perhaps it is the result of the rift between Greco-Roman rationalism and Jewish monotheism, which sent science and philosophy off packing in one direction and religion in another. But even in the relatively timeless writings of Marcus Aurelius we find the split deeply pronounced, as if it had been there from the beginning. “Either Providence or Atoms!” he proclaims. Either there is God ordering all things for the best, or there is humanity, struggling nobly, but somewhat blindly against the backdrop of a beautiful but indifferent universe.
This was precisely the value of Human Revolution for the West, I suggested to Saito. In the Lotus-based teachings of the Soka Gakkai we find an approach to humanism that, at last, is vigorous enough to stand alongside religion as an equal partner in conferring dignity, meaning, and value on human life. To articulate this position—and to strengthen it—has been the primary purpose of Daisaku Ikeda’s landmark dialogues with philosophers, statesmen, and scientists from around the world. With his mentor-driven practice of raising up each individual as the basis for Human Revolution, Ikeda has internationalized a message that seems destined to become universal over the coming century, as it spreads to other religions, other cultures, and other ways of thought. The SGI has a very special mission in spreading that new religious model around the world.